John Gregory Dunne, reporter, essayist, novelist, scriptwriter, wry observer of California mores, is best known for two of his five earlier books ["Vegas" and "True Confessions."] … If you liked these earlier books, you will like "Dutch Shea, Jr." For one thing, the heroes of all three books are "people without illusion"—except for the illusion that they are without them.

The detectives among Mr. Dunne's characters are exemplary; like their West Coast ancestors in Hammett, Chandler and Ross MacDonald, they are people who "expected the worst" and to whom "the worst did not mean much," people who "accepted as a given the taint on human nature." Detectives imply mysteries; mysteries imply crime, sin, guilt—and there's plenty of all that in Mr. Dunne's fiction…. His new hero, Dutch Shea Jr., is not a detective by profession but by pressure of events, of forces as much within as around...